We have obtained a list of many of the e-mail addresses of parents who requested news and information e-mails from Tootsville.com. It’s uncertain exactly when this list was made, but it seems to date from around August or September of 2009.

This list has the e-mail addresses of parents who ticked the option “please send me news and updates by e-mail” when they logged in to Tootsville.com around that time.

Beginning now, and running through Friday, we’ll be reaching out to them with a message like the following.

Hopefully, this will let our legacy players reserve their Toot names now, and maybe find some old friends who haven’t heard about the new game yet.

Toots, as you know, are magical elephants who can use Wish Magic and live on the Island of Tootanga. Some Toots have special abilities.

The Magic Toots are the Toots who are special and famous. The Basic 8 are Magic Toots, and so are some other characters. You can meet the Magic Toots in the game all the time: they never sign off.

Other Toots are players. Some of these players have special abilities.

Operators can help you if you have problems in the game. They can use special magic to help you when you need them. If you need to contact an Operator, you can dial “0” on your mobile phone in Tootsville.

If you want to become an Operator, you can learn how to help other players. There is special training before you can get special powers.

The Troops are also helpers. They don’t have special powers, but they do things that keep Tootsville running. In the past, the Toot Troops have helped to stop monsters like the evil Shade from destroying Tootsville.

Builder Toots put the world together. They have programming skills to make new things in the world.

You can tell if someone is a Magic Toot, Operator, or Builder Toot sometimes. When you click on a Toot, you can see their Paper Doll. It will have a special badge on it to let you know.

When these special Toots speak, their speech balloons are colored. Normal Toots speak with white speech balloons.

Between 2010 and into 2012, Tootsville player “Otiekinz” wrote a blog about what was happening in Tootsville. You can read it here. Hundreds of users read Otie’s stories about games and special events in Tootsville at the time.

Tootsville has always been accessible to children. In earlier versions, in fact, the game was marketed mostly to children!

Providing an online, multiplayer video game for children is pretty tricky. We need to comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) in the USA, as well as common-sense privacy guidelines. We also want to keep parents “in the loop” and encourage shared game play time.

Our guidelines for “being nice” within the game world (including the “diamond icons” system) are a topic for another time.

Of course, the best experience is side-by-side game play. If your family is lucky enough to have two computers, or a computer and a tablet or advanced mobile phone, you can sign in simultaneously and play along with one another. In the future, we’ll also offer things like “Sidekick mode” and split-screen game play for PC users with game pads.

Today, we’re revealing an early draft of our new child account sign-in design. This is how children under age 13 will sign in to the game in future.

First, parents will create their own account, and create a Toot character for their child to use.

Later, when their child returns to the game, we’ll have a special log-in control that they can use. They’ll give the name of their Toot character and some kind of information, like a password.

This will send off an e-mail to the parent, who may be able to receive it even on (for example) a mobile phone that is not itself able to join the game. They can reply to that message or click a link to authorize their child’s log-in, and set a time limit for play.

Check out this Wiki-Wiki page for more details. We welcome suggestions on how to improve this design! We still have a lot of work ahead of us.